It’s Not Practical or Realistic
Growing up in Sitka, Alaska had many perks. You could go out to one of the hundreds of islands and have it all to yourself. You were surrounded by natural beauty. There wasn’t much crime to worry about. All your friends went to the same school and were likely in the same classes. The list goes on.
But living in Alaska as a teenager in high school, dreaming of what career I wanted to pursue had its challenges. Sitka is on an island. You can’t just take a road trip to the next town. You are stuck there. And it seemed only natural when deciding which career path to follow that it better be one that made sense and would work, otherwise you might never leave (which is something I really wanted to do when I was 17 years old).
I remember dreaming of making movies for a living. NOT being an actor. But making movies. I loved movies (still do), and I didn’t even necessarily aspire to be a director, because so many positions sounded interesting. Cameraman, location scout, production coordinator, casting director, producer, film editor, etc. Even just errand boy or janitor sounded ok as a teenager stuck in a high school classroom.
But all of those jobs were in southern California. I knew that it was a pretty cutthroat industry; there were thousands lining up for the same job. It also seemed like a world away. No one I knew could speak about the industry with any firsthand knowledge.
This was before YouTube, and really the internet was just getting going back then, so finding out information was very limited. My local library wasn’t helpful either. It just seemed like an impractical pipe dream.
And I couldn’t afford impractical pipe dreams. All the advice pointed at going to college. Pick a degree that you can get a good job from that hopefully you enjoy, one day get married, buy a house with a white picket fence. You know the story.
Had I been living even near California, I imagine I could have at least explored options on how to break into a job in the movie business. Maybe that would have made a difference. Maybe not. It’s hard to say.
But looking back I know if I took my savings I had accumulated from my landscaping business, (that all went to paying for my first year of college), I could have just driven down to California, and fought and scraped by to get a job mopping floors or running errands until I earned opportunities to be a production assistant and so on up the ladder.
I don’t have any regret about not doing that. I didn’t even understand that was an option at 18 years of age. Plus, I ended up working a couple of years in the movie business anyway, coming from a completely unexpected path years later. (Another story)
But there is a giant lesson in all this.
It’s about pursuing the impossible.
When I was 18, working in the movie business seemed impossible.
Most of us don’t pursue things because the GAP, between where you are now and the thing you desire seems too great. Worlds apart even. IT’S NOT PRACTICAL OR REALISTIC.
The older I get, the more I see how the world is changing to make following your passions far more realistic and practical than ever before.
Remember the movie A Knight’s Tale with the late Heath Ledger? The theme of that movie is “changing your stars.” How a kid from a poor family with no connections to royalty can become a knight, essentially doing the impossible.
I love that corny movie. And it’s a fun reminder of how the world used to work and how different it is today.
Today you can become an expert on just about anything and you don’t have to go to an Ivy League school. The information you need can come right to your living room from your laptop computer.
Today if you want to be an actress, you don’t have to wait to be hired on a movie, you can create your own movie and distribute it through YouTube.
However, to become an expert at something, and by expert, I mean someone who is truly in the top 1% of knowledge and skill for a given topic or profession, you have to put in the work.
There’s no shortcutting that part. There is no magic pill. You have to learn and apply that knowledge. Fail hundreds if not thousands of times to learn nuances about your craft that only the experts know and understand.
I became an expert in my local real estate market, not because I got a real estate license and put that on my business card. I became an expert over time in large part because I did an hour-long live radio show every week for 8 years. This forced me to study the market daily, on a much, much higher level than my counterparts, because I needed to figure out what the heck I was going to talk about on the radio. I had to look for trends that others may not be seeing and find segments of the market that most people were overlooking.
However, there are many areas of my profession in which I am not an expert. Such as selling farms and ranches. I have a decent knowledge base about those properties, but there are many others in my profession who know worlds more than I do in that area of real estate.
The cool part is that I could study the farm/ranch side of my business for 1 hour every day for 6 months and easily be in the top 1% of agents with expertise in that sector of the market.
Same goes for any other sector of my profession.
I don’t have to go to a special school or get a special certification. I just have to study. I apply that knowledge to find out what areas I’m still weak in, and study some more.
The world we live in today is so exciting for those who are willing to put in the work to become an expert in something.
It makes me really excited for my kids. They can chase so many dreams without having to worry if a certain college will accept them or about getting a job in a competitive industry.
They can put the work in themselves and become extremely sought-after experts because of their knowledge and skill.
It’s freakin’ cool.
And it all starts with just deciding to put in the work or not.
One hour a day, every day, may not seem like that big of a deal or enough to cover the gap of where you are now and where you want to be.
But that is the secret. Everyone feels that way. Which is why most don’t bother to make those 1% daily improvements, so they don’t experience the compounding effect of daily improvements over 6 months to a year. They instead take experimental bites here and there and determine the gap is too big.
More than ever it seems to me that we can make the impossible, possible. Or at least more probable.
We can change our stars with daily purposeful steps to shorten the gap.
What are you stepping towards right now?
Cheers,
Mike Turner
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